Is your website losing you customers? A ten-minute check
Open your own website on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and time it. Most small business sites lose customers for four plain reasons: they load too slowly, they do not say what the business does, the phone number is hard to reach, and the contact form is quietly broken. All four are checkable in ten minutes.
Test it the way a customer meets it
You know your own website too well to judge it. You know where everything is, you have it cached, and you are usually on a desktop connected to fast broadband. Almost none of that is true for the person deciding whether to call you.
So test it the way they meet it: on a phone, on mobile data, having never seen it before. That single change surfaces most of the problems below without any tools at all.
The seven checks
- Time the load. Count the seconds until you can read something useful. Past four or five seconds on mobile data, a meaningful share of visitors are gone before the page appears.
- Read the first screen without scrolling. Does it say what you do and where you do it? A stranger should know within seconds whether they are in the right place.
- Find the phone number. On a local business site it should be visible immediately and tappable. If you have to hunt, so does everyone else.
- Send yourself a message through the contact form. Broken forms are common and invisible: nothing arrives, and nobody tells you, because the failure looks exactly like nobody getting in touch.
- Check it in one hand. Small text, buttons too close together, anything needing pinch-zoom — all of it costs you visitors on the device most of them are using.
- Search Google for site: followed by your domain. No results means the site is not indexed, and nothing else matters until that is fixed.
- Look for anything out of date. Last year's opening hours, a closed location, a price that changed. Stale details cost trust faster than an ugly design does.
Fix them in this order
Indexing first — an invisible site cannot lose customers because it never gets any. Then the broken contact route, because that is enquiries you have already earned and are losing at the last step.
After that: clarity of the first screen, then speed, then mobile layout. Design comes last, and usually matters far less than owners expect.
Frequently asked questions
How fast should a small business website be?
On mobile data, aim for something readable within about two to three seconds. Past four or five, drop-off rises sharply. Speed matters more on phones than on desktop, which is where most local searches happen.
Do I need to redesign my website?
Usually not. Most small business sites lose customers because of speed, clarity, a hard-to-find phone number or a broken form — none of which a redesign necessarily fixes, and all of which are cheaper to address directly.
How do I know if my website is on Google?
Search Google for site: followed by your domain with no space, for example site:mybusiness.co.uk. If nothing comes back, the site is not indexed, and that is the first thing to resolve.
More guides
Why isn't my business showing on Google Maps?
Nine reasons a business does not appear on Google Maps, how to check each one, and what to fix first. Written for owners, not marketers.
How to ask for Google reviews without being annoying
When to ask, how to ask, what UK rules now allow, and why incentives are a bad idea. A practical guide for small business owners.
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